Two issues with the disk have worsened this past week, so the 3rd maintenance period of the year will begin (and hopefully end) this weekend to fully resolve them.

The first issue began near the end of January and occurred on the same drive where active simulator sessions are saved. It likely impacted simulator performance across both BrantSteele.com and BrantSteele.net and may have led to more frequent resets. I identified the source of the error in the logs.

I’ve been monitoring the second issue for the past several years. A storage drive, different from the main drive, is filling due to the accumulation of saved seasons on the BrantSteele.net simulators. Under certain criteria, saved simulations that have not been recently viewed are regularly backed up to an external drive and removed from the server. Upon user request, I can recover these seasons for them. The more simulations are saved, the longer this has been taking, so I have been doing this less frequently. Part of this maintenance will involve coming up with a better structure to inform users if and when the simulation was deleted to assist with the recovery process.

The other part of the maintenance involves finally releasing an updated internal structure for the Hunger Games Simulator to reduce the size of saved season since that is the most commonly used simulator. My goal is to do this without any downtime or noticeable differences to the Hunger Games Simulator itself – just a brief period of time where saving/loading is unavailable. Without these changes, the storage drive will fill before the end of the year and saving simulations will no longer be possible under the current removal criteria. I hope that after these changes go into effect, I will only have to do save season removals once or twice per year and can further relax the removal criteria.

ALL MAINTENANCE HAS BEEN COMPLETED!

For those of you interested in the next simulator, it will be the Celebrity Big Brother US Simulator. It’s been in development for the past few months and is getting closer to being released. Estimated release dates for this and the other remaining Big Brother and Survivor simulators are not available, but more teasers will be posted as it gets closer to completion.